I'm working on getting a Red Hat 6 LAMP server going and while the PHP that comes with it has many extensions we use, it doesn't have all of them.

To solve this, I was thinking about either

1. compiling the PHP extensions which come in the ext folder of the downloadable source code of PHP 5.3.3 from php.net
2. same as #1, but using the extensions from the latest PHP version (currently 5.3.8).
3. Do #1 but manually decide which updates to backport from the latest version of the PHP extensions into the older version and then compile the backported result

A drawback to #1 is that security and bug fixes come out which we wouldn't be able to take advantage of.

A drawback to #3 is that it might be a lot of work

Does anyone know what the drawbacks to #2 are? I don't want to go down that route if it might result in some unexpected negative outcomes.

Also, are there any other drawbacks to the other options or a better way to go altogether? I want to use the PHP 5.3.3 which comes with the Linux distro because I don't want us to get to a place again where we are forced to upgrade to a new version of PHP to stay on top of security updates like from PHP 5.2.x to 5.3.x and there be backwards incompatible changes (this is the situation we're in now with PHP 5.2.x no longer being supported).